Home+ Specialty Pharmacy’s Denise Tipton, Pharmacy Specialist in Rapid City, and her husband, Scott, owner of Tipton Grease Service Incorporated, knew that Scott would one day need a kidney transplant, but they didn’t know it would happen because of a selfless sacrifice made by Denise.
Scott has a genetic kidney disease called IgA nephropathy. Sometimes called Berger disease, IgA nephropathy causes inflammation and reduced kidney function as it pertains to filtering wastes from blood. It’s a degenerative disease that gets worse over time and can lead to kidney failure. “I’ve had it since my early 20s, so I’ve had it for almost 30 years,” Scott, 51, says. “My kidneys are slowly deteriorating.”
Two years ago, though, a doctor phoned Scott and informed him that recent tests showed he needed to drop whatever he was doing and head directly to an emergency room because his kidneys were failing. Scott, who was in a supermarket at the time, left a full cart of groceries and rushed to the ER. He began his first dialysis treatment immediately and has been receiving weekly dialysis ever since. The time to sign up for a kidney donation had come.
“Normally, a person that goes through a transplant needs to get approved to get on the list, and they start out with a list of donors that would work,” he says. “But they wait for somebody to pass away, a deceased donor. Right now, it’s averaging about eight years of a wait for my kidney type, that way. I was blessed to have a lot of family members, friends, neighbors, people from church, ex-relatives, new relatives, all different kinds of people that had offered me a kidney, as living donors.”
Unfortunately, none of the living donors matched. However, there was another option, a person could donate to a kidney exchange on Scott’s behalf. By donating a kidney to an anonymous person on the list, Scott would be granted priority status, meaning that Scott would be much more likely to receive a transplant sooner. Denise had prepared for this possibility by keeping herself healthy and she didn’t hesitate to volunteer a kidney of her own in Scott’s name. “I had a feeling that I was gonna be the person,” she says. “I’ve always worked out and ate pretty healthy. I started that back when his kidney failed. So I’d been working at making sure I was healthy enough so if everybody else got rejected that they wouldn’t say no, because he was so sick, and I didn’t want I didn’t want him to have to wait any longer.”
After passing physical and mental exams, Denise’s donation procedure was performed at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Her extracted kidney was then flown to an unnamed donor on the west coast. Denise and Scott are unable to find out any information about the recipient until at least four months after the transplant and, even then, they may not hear from that person at all. It’s entirely up to the recipient. However, they do know that the kidney has been successfully transplanted and that the recipient’s body is accepting the kidney without issue.
An exchange recipient with priority status, like Scott, usually waits about 8 months before an available kidney is found. However, his blood type is rare, so he’s currently about 2 months into what he’s been told could be up to a 12 month wait.
As for Denise, it’s been about 10 weeks since she donated her kidney. She is feeling almost the same as before the procedure, a testament to her healthy lifestyle.
And now, it’s just a waiting game, albeit an emotional one. “I’m just pretty excited,” Scott says, fighting back tears. “Even for the other person who got Denise’s kidney, because I know how much their life is going to change. This disease really limits you. There are a lot of things I can’t do. I’m blessed to have a good wife that cares about me.”
To learn more about kidney donation: www.kidney.org/.
Story: Kory Lanphear